Commentary: Customized medicine could improve health care

The adoption of personalized medicine could "help take the guesswork out" of health care, resulting in reduced expenses as well as treatment decisions that are more accurate and effective, write HHS Secretary Michael Leavitt and Harvard Medical School professor Raju Kucherlapati in The Boston Globe. For instance, Leavitt and Kucherlapati argue, the use of an affordable genetic test to determine the right dose of warfarin, a blood-thinning drug, might save up to $1 billion annually while providing better care.